Representative appeals to Speaker Pelosi to bar renegade Republicans.

PG News
Green Perspectives
By Chuck Fall

Representative Bill Pascrell from New Jersey is indignant that 126 House Republicans betrayed their oath to the constitution when they filed legal briefs in support of the State of Texas lawsuit that asks the US Supreme Court to intervene in the electoral processes of 4 states. The SCOTUS declined to hear the case.

The Trump campaign and the president himself have called the 2020 election a “fraud,” “stolen,” advanced multiples lawsuits in multiple states to stall the vote count, or suppress voter turnout. The president has not prevailed in any of the suits his people have filed for lack of evidence.

President Trump has nurtured and advanced a claim that he has been wronged and refuses to concede; indeed, the president has used these false claims to solicit donations and build a political war chest to spend as he sees fit in the the post-presidential chapter of his life.

Does the President believe what he says, or is his denunciation of the election just political theater? Perhaps Representative Pascrell is staging a scene to match the President’s.

Rep. Pascrell points to Amendment 14, Section 3 that makes it unconstitutional for elected representatives to seek to overthrow the government. By standing with President Trump’s claim that the election was stolen, and that President-elect Biden is not legitimate, the Representatives deny the legitimacy of the electoral process, and side with President Trump in violation of their constitutional oath, Rep. Pascrell argues.

The long serving New Jersey representative is asking Speaker Pelosi to use her authority to bar the Republican representatives from taking their seats in the House, if possible. Otherwise, he asks that she do something to hold the representatives to account for their malfeasance.

William Rivers Pitt in TruthOut writes that he doubts the Speaker will take any strong action against the Republicans; but he acknowledges that the country is being pushed toward autocracy, and the impunity of the political elites to violate the constitution will only end if strong sanctions are applied. The Pacific Greens agree.

“Looking at our democracy from the ‘broken window theory,’ of how a neighborhood deteriorates due to neglect, the failure to repair our broken civil discourse, and rickety electoral processes, will lead to deeper political alienation,” said Charles Newlin, PGP Media contact.

“The Republicans’ refusal to play by the rules, to follow electoral law, does have a corrosive effect on democracy itself,” said Newlin. “We encourage Speaker Pelosi to turn the Republican rebellion into some kind of a national teach-able moment, so the country can avoid a repeat of this kind of dangerous and irresponsible political theater in the future.”

Pointing out that the president’s lawsuits to overturn the election started with attacks on mail in ballots, and later focused on lobbying state legislators to appoint electors to override the vote, Newlin said “the Greens want to highlight the need for the president to be elected by popular vote; that would have settled the matter of who is president long ago and denied the President an opportunity to claim the election was stolen. The Congress needs to institute reforms next year.”

The Pacific Green Party recognizes the importance of the democratic reforms developed by the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship in the report “Our Common Purpose;” chiefly is the call to implement campaign finance reforms, and most significantly, implement Ranked Choice Voting for selecting our elected representatives, two reforms the Greens support strongly.

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Sources:

https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/report

The 126 GOP House Reps Who Tried to Overthrow Democracy Must Not Be Seated

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/05/682286587/house-democrats-introduce-anti-corruption-bill-as-symbolic-first-act

What just happened at the Capitol.


January 13, 2021
Progressive Green News
By Chuck Fall

There really has been some kind of insurrection by Trump followers, but it is emerging that the invasion by a mob into the Capitol was not a spontaneous event either; it was planned for, but as far as any insurrection goes, the one on the Capitol was clumsy and fumbled. I scratch my head and try to make sense of it.

It appears Mr. Trump really believed that he could throw the election and hold onto the presidency; but he didn’t think it through, or consider all the angles; it was a terrible idea based on a terrible plan; he acted on his narcissistic impulse to not be a loser, maybe this is why the insurrection failed.

If we accept the President’s own rhetoric, then the purpose of the march to the Capitol from his rally at the Ellipse, was to ‘stop the steal,’ and to interrupt the certification of the Electoral College results. The mob only disrupted and delayed the constitutional step of certifying the electoral college count.

Evidently, Pence communicated to President Trump that he wouldn’t not certify. Vice-president Pence wouldn’t play his part. Pence was the weak link in a plan to ‘stop the steal’ and for Trump and his Republican followers to keep Trump in office.

It is hard to imagine how Trump could have made the insurrection succeed, but he believed he had the support of enough Republican Party members that he could prevail; but it required a mob and complicity from others to enable insurrection.

The most obvious and glaring example of complicity in the insurrection is the decision to not deploy National Guard units around the Capitol; it would provide a bad “optic,’ the Department of Defense official is reported to have said in a Washington Post article. Someone in Defense declined the request to have Guard units at the ready.

The Washington Post reported that the Mayor of Washington D.C. requested National Guard troops be deployed as reinforcements of the Capitol building; she asked for this on January 5th. Department of Defense wouldn’t commit, or deflected the request and postponed a decision til after 4pm on January 6th, after rioters had left the building.

The dithering is a tell; it shows interference in what should have been a “best security” practice. Even President Trump is reported to have been involved in discussions with Department of Defense about the “optics” of deploying National Guard troops around the Capitol, and has “seemingly” influenced the decision to not deploy National Guard troops on the morning of January 6th. This definitely needs to be investigated, and heads need to role at the Department of Defense for declining the Mayor’s request for immediate deployment.

Though the Capitol Police put up a fight, it wasn’t enough, there was obvious deference given to Trump’s followers contrasted with the way Black Lives Matter protesters were treated by police agencies over the Summer. This nod to white privilege shows how deep racist feelings run. Many in the police see the Trump followers as their people, unlike how many police view the BLM protester.

The protestors were from the hard right, and they really wanted to hurt someone it seems, given the zip ties, the “hang Mike Pence” chant, the searching for Speaker Pelosi, and violent attack on a Capitol police officer.

Among the mob who broke into the Capitol were military veterans, off-duty police, elected officials, professionals, people from all stripes of life, but mostly made up of alienated white people. Many if not most, largely embrace the Qanon message that Trump is a hero and great for America. And the Qanon mindset has caused a real break with reality.

One critic of the Qanon program, an expert in manufacturing of computer gaming, notices that the Qanon narrative matches with computer game story lines, showing how the Qanon is not an “organic” individual but is an algorithm, a machine created, narrative.

Computer game technology has enabled ‘Qanon,’ or those behind Qanon, to capture the imagination of Trump followers. Qanon game format let’s followers participate with guess work and imagination, and plays on them so they feel engaged and included in something they feel is real.

The critic speculates that Qanon could be a project of a national government, or run by people close to Trump that are well financed; the Qanon effort requires considerable expertise and money to sustain.

As a result people who follow Qanon do suffer from a form of delusion because they have bought into a “game theory” story line invented by a technocrat in some section of the deep state. An ironic situation given the Qanon claim that Trump is fighting the Deep State, which he may well be, but not for a virtuous reason.

Members of Congress are demanding a full investigation. There is evidence of a conspiracy to withhold National Guard units til after the event; investigators need to look into the failure to act on the intelligence that suggested plans to disrupt the Congress.

Since the Washington Post reported on the Department of Defense refusal to act on the January 5th request for troops, there has been scant follow up on this thread. Some are calling the Capitol riot an orchestrated event that involved the complicity of groups from the Capitol police, to Department of Defense officials, all of whom supported efforts to weaken Capitol defenses, so the mob could enter and interrupt the official receipt of the Electoral College vote.

Democrat members of the House now allege some of their Republican counterparts were seen giving tours of the Capitol to individuals who would return the next day as a member of the mob.

On the face of the evidence, it appears that Trump followers in the Department of Defense, the national legislature, state legislatures, police departments and across the military, supported efforts to throw the election to Trump. Elements within all of these agencies participated in the the action to interrupt the final official act to formally recognize Biden, short of the inauguration.

It remains to be seen how this all plays out; but I am not going to assume that the full story will ever be revealed. Will investigations reveal the full scope of the planning, and identify those who participated in the planning? I am not holding my breath, but will always call for the truth.

I also look forward to the constitutional exercise of the 14th amendment, Section 3, applied to insurrection. this will be interesting to see if anything comes of claims against Republican elected officials.


Sadly, Trump followers have been drinking the President’s narrative that the election was stolen. The problem is the evidence for this is not present. Claiming Trump won more votes than Biden doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; State election officials have all certified the electoral votes for their state; to suggest that 52 states committed fraud, or even that only a few states committed fraud, needs to be demonstrated with evidence and Trump could not do that.

Trump followers need to repent for their sin of accepting lies from a demagogue, and acting on that information to try to keep Trump in office.

But to be fair to Trump followers, or anyone who questions the results of the elections; there is a long history of electoral theft, that is true. One thing that should be demanded by the Democrats and Republicans is for a national voting policy and electoral reforms. We need in all states a vote by paper ballot method, high security electronic counting, regular audits to ensure accuracy, and the implementation of campaign finance reform as well as Ranked Choice Voting to enhance voter choice.

JFK and the Unspeakable: a book review

JFK and the Unspeakable: why he died and why it matters: by James W. Douglass (2008):

Why should we care about knowing the truth about JFK’s assassination?

A poll that got a headline on Yahoo News reports that 75% of those polled do not believe the official criminal theory that JFK’s assassination was the work of a lone gunman: namely, Lee Harvey Oswald.  Significantly, only 25% of Americans believe the Warren Commission report, a vast 8 volume set that rationalizes Arlen Specter’s famous single bullet, single gunman ‘anti-conspiracy-theory’ theory.

Shouldn’t this collective doubt alone be grounds for a new, transparent investigation of JFK’s assassination?

In JFK and the Unspeakable: why he died and why it matters (2008), author James W. Douglas avails himself of the most recent revelations of the plot to kill Kennedy and provides one of the most plausible explanations for JFK’s assassination. The unspeakable is the suggestion that agents of the American security state establishment; namely, the CIA and the FBI, and the Secret Service killed the president.

While Douglas does not build a definitive criminal case (beyond a reasonable doubt), for the conspirators in JFK’s murder, this book definitely shows by a a preponderance of evidence that government agents were negligent in JFK’s death.

After reading this book, the reader is left with a preposterous but plausible explanation for Kennedy’s assassination. Essentially, the author puzzles out a motive and cover-up by government actors to show how Kennedy threatened the growth and development and policy objectives of what Eisenhower famously warned about: the danger of the military / industrial complex to American democracy.

Douglas’s analysis paints President Kennedy’s assassination as a result of Kennedy’s failure to stay on course with the national security state leaders, then led by Allen Dulles; Dulles was fired by Kennedy but was later brought back into government to act as an executive director of the Warren Commission and oversee the crafting of the Warren Commission report.

Kennedy, Douglas shows, embraced the possibility of peace in the world and sought to scale back, or temper the Cold War fever endemic among the Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and FBI.

The notion that Kennedy was a friend of the peace movement is not how he is most often portrayed; instead, though heralded as from “Camelot”, he is often portrayed as a hawk and as the one responsible for getting us into the Vietnam War.

To re-brand Kennedy as a peace president, Douglas opens his analysis with a discussion of Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk and peace advocate who was in correspondence with members of the American elite about pursuing peace given the development of the nuclear bomb and its horrible implications.

The author provides a meticulous review of events in a multiple time frame structure, but uses Merton’s call for peace as a backdrop of Kennedy’s intellectual milieu. Kennedy personally experienced the horror of war, but as president stood on the brink of nuclear annihilation and had to balance his personal views with a military establishment pushing for a first nuclear strike against Russia that would lead to millions of people dying on both sides.

One poignant take away from this revision of the Kennedy presidency as one orienting toward “not war,” is that Kennedy’s assassination then put policy on a certain “yes war” path. His death robbed the country of an alternative historical trajectory that could have put the United States on a less bellicose course than was carried out in the Vietnam War and has followed the 9/11 attacks.

Kennedy wanted to avoid nuclear war, and he saw the possibility of peace as the logical path to follow. To this end, Kennedy sought private channels for talks with Kruschev and Fidel Castro because he didn’t trust the establishment staff; to further alienate the war hawks, Kennedy sought to negotiate settlements with nationalist leaders from post-colonial countries versus waging covert war against communist opponents as was the practice.

Douglas shows how Kennedy’s experience in war tempered his attitude about it, and how his intellectual life enabled him to appreciate the absolute horror a nuclear war conjured up, but these dispositions destined him to be at odds with his State Department, Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA, and even the Secret Service. Horrible and preposterous as this sounds, the President was betrayed by his own people.

JFK and the Unspeakable dishes up a number of eye-popping revelations that plausibly review the complicated plot that brought down the president. The total truth cannot ever be known because most of the perpetrators have died of old age and taken the truth to the grave. However, the author provides a virtual indictment of key individuals across multiple departments of government that makes a solid case for a government conspiracy to kill the president, and cover up the plot.

Douglas provides extensive footnotes to document his review of motives for and the events preceding and following the assassination.

But what is the reader to do with a book that takes you to the edge of the moral abyss and exposes you to an unspeakable horror, the same horror that reared its ugly head in the 9/11 attacks? And why does JFK’s death matter?

The author hopes a peace movement might develop that picks up where Kennedy left off in 1963. Indeed, foundational to the premise of JFK and the Unspeakable is a speech Kennedy gave to the graduating class at the American University in which he calls for peace, nuclear disarmament, respect for national movements in post-colonial countries, and unilaterally announces that the U.S. would cease atmospheric testing of hydrogen bombs (up to which time the U.S. had exploded 70 in the south pacific).

This speech shows Kennedy’s peace credentials, but also highlights the collision course he was on with agents of the national security state.

To honor Kennedy and get justice for his assassination, a peace movement must demand accountability of the government with an independent and transparent investigatory commission that would have access to all relevant information to reveal the truth about JFK’s murder, and the events of 9/11.

In writing this book about JFK, Douglas quietly invokes Ghandi’s non-violent call for a revolution that would build a world at peace, and by implication, drive governments to marshal all necessary resources to repair the earth and affirm the dignity of human-kind as eco-stewards of the earth; this vision, antithetical to the objectives and interests of the military / industrial complex, lies at the heart of understanding JFK.

Build endowment for journalism from Khashoggi justice fund.

The Honorable Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley,

 January 22, 2019

Dear Senators,

You have received my call that an endowment to journalism be made by a $1 billion dollar penalty assessed against the Saudi government on behalf of Jamal Khashoggi. Thank your for your reply.

Please see this call for Justice for Kashoggi: https://truthtopowerpdx.wixsite.com/justiceforkhashoggi

Please see this original appeal for Justice for Kashoggi: https://gijn.org/2018/10/29/jamal-khashoggi/

Within weeks of Khashoggi’s assassination, I made a call for justice for Jamal Khashoggi; I argue that the attack on Khashoggi was more than a murder of a journalist. When agents of a nation/state act with impunity to assassinate a journalist, a tremendous breach of the social order occurs, for an attack against a journalist is ultimately an attack on the institution of journalism, a necessary agency in a free society. And so, when the Crown Prince ordered the hit on Khashoggi he revealed total contempt for human rights, dignity of a free and open society, respect for rule of law. Therefore a severe sanction should be assessed against the Saudi nation that will provide a lasting measure of justice that complements the egregiousness and callousness shown by Saudi agents.

As you are in the process of designing sanctions against the Saudi government and individual members, consider the importance of using Khashoggi’s assassination as an opportunity to lever sanctions into financial penalties that will then really serve justice, for what better justice could there be than that there is an endowment that guarantees services to journalists risking their lives to speak truth to power, as endeavored Jamal Khashoggi.

Please include a penalty and plan for collecting any judgment in any laws passed to sanction Saudi Arabia for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. And identify an endowment fund to collect penalties and enumerate a process for releasing funds.

Please review this article from the Global Investigative Journalism Network, it speaks to the need for funding to support investigative and human rights oriented journalism. https://gijn.org/2016/03/17/investigative-journalism-and-foreign-aid-a-huge-return-on-investment/

The experts in the journalism industry know what journalists need to be safe and secure, but funds to support this important work is in short supply.

Critically, the law(s) needs to be written so that when a state agent acts with impunity, an investigation is triggered, a civil judgment is made, then a financial penalty is assessed, and sanctions posed to enforce the judgment.

I hope that from such a law, journalists will be held in higher esteem, and acts of impunity will trigger an expeditious process for investigating, and enable a judgment against an offending state agent, or other corrupt figure. This event will lessen the inclination of state agents to act with impunity.

Finally, I am attaching my original call, and an unpublished essay amplifying the argument in the call.

Thank you for fighting for justice for Khashoggi and for journalists world wide.

Regards,

Chuck Fall

In solidarity with Black Lives Matter

The deep indignation felt by the Black Lives Matter movement is conditioned by acts of impunity carried out by law enforcement, private citizens, and other institutions. In our current era, the disproportionate number of people of color in prison and, the disproportionate shootings of African Americans by white police officers evokes lynchings of yesteryear. There has been very little to no accounting, so acts of impunity continue.

Breaking the chains of systemic racism can be accomplished if there are consequences for these modern acts of impunity. The historic lack of consequences has bred our current order. Getting a public review of the circumstances of Dr. King’s assassination would serve to break the long history of impunity. If we don’t revisit Dr. King’s death, then our nation may very well continue to be mired in enmity.

Justice for Dr. King would be a significant step toward rectifying past wrongs. Some in the Pacific Green Party of Oregon support efforts to re-open an investigation into Dr. King’s murder as a necessary tactic in a strategy to end systemic racism.

Dr. King’s assassination, and the other 1960’s assassinations, have left an invisible scar on the American psyche. A just accounting of the crime can heal our national wound because it will involve truth, justice and hopefully some form of national reconciliation.

In the case of King Family civil suit against the United States government, it was found by a preponderance of evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was complicit in the murder / assassination fo Dr. King; his death was an undercover lynching, the murder being pinned on a patsy, James Earl Ray. We reference the account by William Pepper in The Plot to Kill Dr. King, The Truth Behind the assassination.

The civil case demonstrated that the King assassination was a conspiracy of federal and local law enforcement that deprived Dr. King of his civil right to live and exercise his First Amendment Rights to lead the country; more deeply, his murder was a statement recognizable to African-Americans; it was another lynching in a long line of them, but the assassination of Dr. King is the most brazen of all lynchings of all time because it struck not just at Dr. King, a man, but at the ideas he espoused, and the vision for which he stood.

The assassination of Dr. King, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a few years earlier and only months later, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, shocked the nation into a stupor that is sustained by official fraud and media complicity in concealing the truth.

The 1960’s assassinations are grounded in an attitude of impunity that stems from the earliest days of America. The country started with an Indian War, which cleared the way for the arrival of the first group of enslaved Africans in 1619. Europeans were undaunted about clearing the way for a slave society.

From the beginning of American life, a slave owner had the absolute sovereign freedom to do what he liked with a slave. Of course the goal was profit, but a recalcitrant freedom loving slave would be killed, in an act of impunity, with the goal of quelling any other dissenters from challenging the order. The colonial state aided and abetted private slave holders. Modern day police brutality, borne of an attitude of impunity, stems from slave holders having unchecked power over others.

The nation’s silence in the face of the 1960’s assassinations, and the lack of a true investigation, meant there would be no justice; the lack of accountability would embolden a further sense of impunity, such is the nature of injustice.

Only through a full disclosure of governmental malfeasance can we break the systemic acts of impunity that are at the core of systemic racism. Systemic racism, as a chain of acts of impunity, can be broken with the truth about how the United States came to be, and why there is such cruelty against people of color.

The assassination of Dr. King was presciently anticipated by Dr. King himself as he was fully aware of the consequences of calling for an end to the Vietnam War, denouncing it as a racist war, a stance Muhammad Ali heroically took in his denunciation of the American War in Vietnam.

Most significantly, Dr. King elevated achieving economic equity as a necessary step toward social justice, and so he called for equitable distribution of resources. This message was gaining traction with more people; his spreading message, tinged with Socialism, reaching into mainstream society posed a greater threat than ever before.

Justice for Dr. King will require peeling back the lies of deception and placing blame where it is due; on actual people in the power structure who have not been prosecuted; as a result there has been no accountability, just as countless earlier lynchings in the American South continued with impunity well into the 1960’s, the cruel deed continues today in the form of police brutality and mass incarceration of people of color.

Some in the Pacific Green Party are inspired by Dr. King’s message and the goals he had for society. We demand justice and an accounting from the government for Dr. King’s assassination; we see this as a first step for undoing systemic racism. We need to return in spirit to 1968, and demand justice and not let up till it’s done. By this tact, we can reclaim historic possibilities denied by Dr. King’s untimely death.

We the people of the Green Party invite African Americans and all people of color and others who feel the call, to make our party your political home; join us in support of Dr. King’s call for economic equity; let us mobilize the movement to accomplish what Dr. King envisioned for America.